Setting up Zendesk Federated Search in your help center

Zendesk Federated Search enables your end users to see content in your help center search results that lives externally from your help center. This means that when an end user searches in your help center, the search results are not just limited to your help center articles or community posts. Federated Search can extend its search to, for example: external knowledge bases, learning management software, blogs, and pages of your website. Your end users can also filter their search by type (for example by blog posts).

This article covers the following topics:

• How Federated Search works
• Ingesting your external records for Federated Search
• Configuring Federated Search
• Setting up your help center theme for Federated Search
• Known limitations of Federated Search

Related articles:

• Enabling search across multiple help centers
• Federated Search API reference

How Federated Search works

The Zendesk Federated Search feature consists of four main parts:

• Federated Search external content API

• Federated Search settings in your help center

• New curlybars helpers for filtering search results in your theme

• Support for Federated Search in the Copenhagen theme

Zendesk provides the REST API that allows you to ingest records of your search content into the Zendesk search indexes (see the following diagram). This is so you can build your own bespoke integration with the Zendesk REST API (see Enabling search across multiple help centers).

Ingesting your external records for Federated Search

After ingesting your first piece of content, the Federated Search will be visible. You can then ingest content records that you want indexed and ranked by your help center search engine. This generates search results with both help center content and external content in one unified ranking on the search results pages. To ingest external content for search, you must integrate the application hosting your external content, with the external content REST API. When an end user clicks an external content search result they are taken to the URL of that external content record.

Using the external content records REST API, you can integrate all 3rd party content that you want to be searchable with your help center search. For more information see the following topics in the Federated Search API reference docs:

• External Content Records
• External Content Sources
• External Content Types

If you are already familiar with the Help Center API, then you'll recognise a number of properties from articles, posts, and topics that overlap with external content records.

Each content record is associated with a content source object and a content type object, which are used to allow filtering by your end user. It works in the same way that articles and posts can be filtered by your help center (if using multiple help center search), and by type (for example, articles or community).

You can completely customize external content records, types, and sources to suit your needs, as each is given a unique ID. This allows you to group external records in the same way that articles and posts are grouped by the help center when using multiple help center search (see Enabling search across multiple help centers). You cannot currently designate one of the two existing types, articles and community, as an external record for filtering.

The types property is an extension of the two types of Guide and Gather content, articles, and community posts.

Configuring Federated Search

You need to build your own integration with the Zendesk REST API then ingest the content you want to show up in your search results. If you have multiple help centers you can also choose which content sources are available on a help center by help center basis.

To enable external content to be searchable in your help center

1. In Guide, click the Settings icon () in the sidebar.
2. Under Search settings > Federated search, click Configure.
3. In Configure Federated search, under External content, select the checkbox of the external content you also want to have included in searches.
4. Click Save.
5. (Optional) If you want the same external content to be searchable across multiple help centers, then from the account dropdown menu, select the help center you want to add the search availability to. Repeat steps 1 - 4.

After you enable external content to be searchable in your help center, you can configure Knowledge results to include external content in Knowledge searches. See Configuring the context panel in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.

Setting up your help center theme for Federated Search

After ingesting your first piece of content the Federated Search UI will be visible, then you can manage whether you want it to be searchable in a help center or not. If you have multiple help centers, you can choose what content can be searchable, and in which help centers.

Customize your existing Guide theme

For external content to show up in search results in your help center search, you must have a theme that supports federated search results. To do this, use the latest version of the Copenhagen theme or replace the old {{help_center_filters}} and {{filters}} helpers with the new {{source_filters}} and {{type_filters}} helpers (see the Help Center templating cookbook).

Known limitations for Federated Search

At present, the following are all known limitations for Federated Search:

• External content search results appear in help center search and Knowledge in the context panel, not in other Guide search-powered interfaces such as Instant Search or the Article Search API.

• It is not possible to designate one of the two existing types, articles and community, to an external record for filtering.